Pre-emptive Movie Reviews.
Dawn of the Dead
I was tired and in a foul mood, angrily awaiting the feature movie The Butterfly Effect, which I attended for reasons I'd rather not go into, when this preview starts and this scary, little Asian girl in a nightgown opens the master bedroom door and stands there, creepily. The mother says, "Honey? Honey, are you all right?" Then something happens, the mother screams, "Honey? What are you doing?!" and the father? I can't go on. Let's just say the shit hit the fan-or rather, the zombie teeth hit the living flesh. And my heart started beating against my ribs trying to flee for the exit.
My aunt took me, my brother and cousins to see the original Dawn of the Dead back in the 70s, when I was nine or 10 years old. As I recall, the movie was originally rated X because nothing that gory had ever been made before. They tried to stop us at the door, warning that the movie was too violent for children, but my beautiful, hippie aunt charmed the ticket geek into letting us kids through.
Ninety minutes later they had to wheel me out of the theater. I was scarred forever and slept with a night light for the next two years. Or rather, slept with my brother's light-I stayed in his bedroom and made him keep his light on for two fucking years-thanks to Dawn of the Dead. This is why I was shaken by the expertly terrifying preview to the remake.
I guess if I were one of those healthy-type reviewers, I'd remember to point out that all Living Dead spinoffs, including George Romero's own remake of Night of the Living Dead, have been miserable failures. I have, however, been sleeping with my bedroom light on since seeing that preview, and I told my brother that I'm moving to Venice Beach to live with him. I told him to stock up on 100-watt light bulbs. I just haven't told him why.
Opens wide March 19
The Prince & Me
The preview to this depressing chick flick is the most revealing of all-revealing both about the movie and about the kind of depressing "chick" that it's marketed towards.
This fairy tale for lonely American females concerns a handsome young prince from Denmark who decides he's tired of royalty's trappings and goes to America to live "undercover" like some poor white trash idiot. So we find our prince playing the role of a student working the counter at a local bar when the gen-Y college student heroine discovers him and they fall in love.
Be warned, Nickel and Dimed this is not. The point of having a lonely gen-Y grrrl meeting her beau in a local bar is to reinforce a whole slew of evil lies that American women want to believe about themselves.
Lie number one: Any middle-class white woman not undergoing chemotherapy is genuinely tolerant and un-materialistic enough to fall in love with a burger-flipper.
Lie number two is revealed when, in the preview, the heroine discovers by accident that her blond beau isn't a burger-flipping slacker but rather a genuine Danish prince. She yells and cries, "You lied to me!" And leaves him. Then she drives away, still crying and crushed, to her white trash Wisconsin home on the range, with some weepy soundtrack accompanying her through the wheat fields.
Um, am I the only one here? Has the whole country gone crazy?
This isn't just a horrible lie-no gen-Y, gen-X or gen-[fill-in-letter-here] female in American history would ever walk away from a burger-flipper who turned out to be a prince. So the real question is, why did the studio heads believe, when they cooked up this film, that there is a demographic many millions strong who would buy into this lie? Do American women really believe this fiction? Are they that deluded? Is black now white? Has the American propaganda machine worked this well?
It gets worse. Naturally, the chick gets wise, beelines straight to the castle in Denmark and catches the Prince's eye during a royal parade. "Hey, its me! The dumb American broad! Please forgive me! If you take me back, you can do anal!"
So they're back together and preparing to get married, but woonchaknowit: The snooty royal parents look down on her because she's a commoner. Here's where another American cultural myth comes into play. See, she's "real" because she's so down-to-earth. She has bad manners and doesn't know where the third fork goes on a royal dinner table. Wow, she's so authentic! Just like Bush faking how he was uncomfortable in a tux when he met the queen at Buckingham Palace.
Folks, it's movies like this that help al Qaeda recruit suicide bombers, and frankly I think that the Homeland Security office should do everything in its power to have The Prince & Me pulled before it opens.
There is one more subtext here, if we're going to talk about the movie's demographics. Most American women marry guys whom they believe "have promise," but these guys turn out to be disappointments. The Prince & Me offers a desperately needed salve to women in this predicament-which in America describes about 90 percent of hitched women.
Thanks to The Prince & Me, these women-who-married-losers can dream that there's something more to him than meets the eye. They can hope against hope that maybe, just maybe, they didn't wind up with a lemon. And that is worth a woman's Andrew Jackson.
But is it worth America's security?
Opens April 2